by Rachel Caine
“Patrick?” Liam asked, standing next to the security controls. “If you’d like me to send her away—”
“She won’t stay away,” Patrick said. “Let her in. I want to know what the hell is going on, and she’s the only one who might be able to tell us.”
“Don’t tell her we recovered anything,” Bryn said. She felt…good. It was such a bizarre fact of her unlife, that she could jump to her death from eight stories up and feel fine a couple of hours and a hot bath later. “Everything but that.”
He nodded. “I’ll let you do the talking, since I’m still a little off.” Of course he was. She wasn’t the only casualty of the morning—just the only one who’d come back from it so quickly. “Go on, Liam. Let her in.”
Liam didn’t seem pleased with the ruling, but he hit the control and activated the speaker to say, “Please drive to the front, Agent Block.”
“Thank you,” she said, and got back in her car. Well. She was in a polite mood—that was something, at least.
Liam turned the screen off and gathered up the coffee cups she and Patrick had been using. “I’ll bring a light lunch,” he said. “Enough for the three of you.”
Joe wasn’t here; he’d stopped off to hand back the thumb drive, then headed home to see his family and get to the funeral home to cover for Bryn. Patrick shook his head. “Never mind lunch. Go watch Annie. I still don’t trust her to stay put, even sedated and restrained.”
Liam looked disapproving, and before he left, he set out a tray of chilled finger-food sandwiches—cheese, cucumber, roast beef. “I’ll get the door and send Riley back here.”
“All right, Mom,” Patrick said. Liam gave him a downright dour look.
“I believe your friend is having a bad influence on you. Sir.”
“Don’t sir me, Liam, or I’ll dock your pay.”
“I write the checks, if you recall. Sir.”
“Game, set, match.” Patrick’s moment of levity passed, and so did Liam’s. “Careful up there.”
“Careful in here,” Liam said, and included Bryn in that as well; he’d taken her ruined clothing away without commenting on the blood or smoke and fire damage, but the looks he gave her were worried and reproachful. “Ring if you need me.”
“I think I can handle Riley Block,” Patrick said.
“One-handed, sir?”
That evoked a smile—a thin one—that showed no lack of confidence. Liam nodded and disappeared from the doorway. He was back a moment later, ushered in Riley, and left again.
Riley was, in fact, not in a polite mood, at least not by the time she arrived in the kitchen. She looked very official, Bryn thought; she was wearing a navy blue suit with a gray blouse that practically shouted FEDERAL AGENT. The only thing missing was the visible shiny badge. She stared at the two of them for a moment, then yanked a chair out from the table and sat down without an invitation. “Don’t even fucking try to tell me you weren’t there,” she said, leveling a finger at Bryn. “What the hell happened? I have seven dead bodies, Bryn! And we’re damn lucky there aren’t more. And I know good and well that this has something to do with Pharmadene.”
“If it had been anybody else but me, you would have had eight bodies,” Bryn said. She shoved the plate of sandwiches toward her. “Lunch?”
Riley’s glare was hot enough to toast the bread. “What. Happened?”
“How do you know it’s related to Pharmadene?”
“Because I was doing a little digging of my own when the word came in,” Riley said. “Graydon is a contractor doing janitorial work for the company. Your turn.”
“I did just as Zaragosa asked. I put on a nice suit and went there to ask questions. When I got there, the place was locked up tight.”
“And you what, broke in?”
Bryn shrugged and ate a finger sandwich. The cucumber was delicious. “Well,” she said, chewing, “it was that or wait around for someone to show up. I kicked in a door. It wasn’t like I stormed the place with a machine gun.”
“And then?”
“And then I searched. I found seven bodies neatly wrapped up in plastic tarps, bound with duct tape. From the smell, they’d been dead for days.”
“Where?”
“Break room.”
“Where, by some weird coincidence, the police found bullet holes around a grate that had fallen off?”
“I’m getting to that.” Bryn laid it out, one step at a time…the search, the bomb, Joe Fideli’s bullet-related assistance in her escape. The jump. That made Riley flinch a little, imagining the subsequent fall and damage, which Bryn made sure to describe in detail. Through it all, Patrick sat in silence, studying Riley with unsettling intensity.
When she finished, there was a short silence before Riley said, “So you came away from that with nothing.”
No way in hell was she handing Riley the thumb drive. “Not only did I not find anything; I had to leave my briefcase behind when I spotted the bomb. So if you find any traces of that…”
That earned her a shake of Riley’s head. “Not much chance,” she said. “The place was an inferno. The only reason we know how many dead there were is the floor collapsed in that room before the bodies were completely incinerated. We’ll be weeks figuring anything else out. Damn it.” Riley’s short fingernails drummed the tabletop, and she reached for a sandwich and bit into it, almost as if she didn’t realize she was taking up the offer of food. “We needed someone alive. Or at least some records to examine.”
“The place had been sanitized. I’m no professional at that kind of thing, but the computers were missing and the file drawers emptied.”
“No DVDs? Backups?”
“Nothing like that,” Bryn said. It wasn’t quite a lie. She still didn’t know what, if anything, was on the thumb drive. “What exactly was Graydon into? I’m assuming someone doesn’t go black ops on a company that just cleans toilets, even if they clean them for Pharmadene.”
“I asked Zaragosa that question. He tells me that on the books they look like a legitimate company.”
“I didn’t even see a broom in the place, but I suppose theoretically they could have been storing all their cleaning supplies in a warehouse somewhere, and these were just the main offices. But there were a lot of file cabinets for a simple waste management company. And we keep coming back to the question: why wipe out seven people who do nothing but empty the trash?”
“Access?” Riley said. “Pharmadene always had tight security, even before the invention of Returné.”
This time, finally, Patrick entered the fray. “First, I used to be in charge of security at Pharmadene, and I wouldn’t have authorized the murder of seven people, whatever the situation. Also, those people died recently, not under the old administration, bad as it was. They were killed after the company went under FBI control. Even so, one thing’s certain. Whatever happened, odds are it had to do with Returné.” He spoke with authority. He’d left Pharmadene in the debacle that had led to the demise of Irene Harte and the old administration, and if anybody knew what the company had been involved with then, he did. For all their insidious dealings, Patrick had tried to keep the security department clean, or at least as clean as possible given the circumstances, until the circumstances had changed violently for the worse.
Then, like any sensible person, he’d—what was the phrase?—left to pursue other opportunities.
“Zaragosa already audited inventory records and accounted for every single vial of the drug still in existence. I just ordered random testing to be sure the vials hadn’t been tampered with or switched, but I don’t think these people were being used to smuggle it out. They wouldn’t have had access to the storage areas.”
“Then they were doing something else, but as to what it was…?” Bryn shrugged and ate another sandwich. She had no idea how she could be this hungry after something so traumatic, but her stomach was cheerfully ignoring any PTSD. “I’ll be honest, this was damn thorough and paranoid work. The killers are gh
osts, and so are your Graydon people. If you want my advice, just let it go. Maybe they were just what they appeared to be: janitors.”
“Janitors don’t usually end up being killed and gift wrapped, but I take your point,” Riley said. “If you came away with nothing, we’re at a dead end.”
“Good. Job’s over. Bryn is finished working for you,” Patrick said.
Riley studied him for a long moment. There was doubt in those dark eyes, and calculation, and she finally inclined her head an unwilling inch. “Done for now,” she said. “Don’t think I won’t be looking into this further, and if I find out you’re holding anything back…”
In a deadly quiet voice, Patrick said, “You should go now, Agent Block. Your welcome’s wearing thin.” He stood up, and even with one arm in a sling, he looked utterly dangerous. Riley got up, and she didn’t turn her back on him. He, on the other hand, walked past her, opened the kitchen door, and held it for her. “Go.”
The FBI agent left without another word. After exchanging a silent look with her, Patrick followed her—seeing she left without any side trips, Bryn assumed. She sat back in her chair, feeling an indefinable sensation of loss; she’d originally liked Riley on some level, when Riley had been acting undercover at Fairview Mortuary. Being at odds with her now was just one more way she was cut off from the world of the normal people. Who can’t jump from an eight-story building, on fire, and eat sandwiches afterward.
Well, in that particular case, at least, being a drug-addicted dead person was proving to be an advantage.
Bryn ate another sandwich before Patrick returned, not so much out of hunger as a restless kind of boredom. He turned on the security camera array built into the far wall of the kitchen and watched Riley drive to the gates and leave before he poured a pint glass of beer and brought it to the table.
Then he slid it across to her. “Congratulations,” he said. She took the glass and drank. “You successfully lied to her. I’m fairly sure that’s not been done often.”
She slid the drink back, and he sipped and claimed one of the rapidly diminishing supplies of sandwiches. “I don’t know what’s on the thumb drive yet. It’s hard for anyone to spot a lie if you aren’t telling one. We should find out what the thing gives us, Pat.” She started to get up, but he shook his head and tugged her down into her chair again.
“After lunch,” he said. “Unless you can’t finish the beer.”
She smiled, took the pint, and chugged it. “Heresy,” she said, and slapped the glass down. “I’m army. We always finish the beer.”
The thumb drive was encrypted, which to Bryn’s mind didn’t seem to be normal procedure for a janitorial company. Patrick was a lot of things, but apparently he wasn’t a superspy encryption expert, and he ejected it from the laptop within a minute or two.
“Couldn’t we…?”
“Mess with it?” he finished for her drily. “Encrypted files are nothing you can pick with a paper clip. We need an expert or we risk triggering some kind of countermeasure that wipes the device clean. Or my laptop.”
“Worried you don’t have your porn backed up?”
“Would I do that?”
“The porn?”
Patrick raised his eyebrows. “Not backing it up. I am a careful man.”
“So what do careful men do at times like these when you have encrypted files hidden by murder victims?”
The moment of humor was over instantly, and he said, “Call someone who’s even more careful. And paranoid.” He reached for his cell phone and dialed, ignoring her silent question: who? And then sighed after a few seconds. “Authentication Bravo Ten Seven. Call me back.” He hung up.
The question of who was moot. “You called Manny Glickman.” Manny was…well, a bit indescribable, Bryn thought. He was brilliant, no doubt of that, but he was also scared of his own shadow. Not without reason. Manny was ex-FBI, and he’d had bad experiences that had left him with significant psychological…issues. But if you wanted a man to solve a puzzle, particularly a scientific one, he was the one to consult. Like the altered nanite formula running through her veins and keeping her alive.
If you could reach him.
“He’s developed a new habit,” Patrick said. “You call an Internet number and read out the code he assigned to you. Then he calls back from an encrypted number. If he feels like it.”
“I didn’t think Manny could get any weirder. Can’t you just talk to Pansy?” Pansy Taylor was Manny’s girlfriend, lab assistant, and psychological prop, and she was the one who kept Manny from drowning in the deep end of the crazy pool.
“I would, but Manny had some kind of scare, and he’s cut off the cell phones again. So this is the only way to get to him until she goes behind his back and activates them again.”
The wait actually wasn’t very long—two or three minutes, at most, until Patrick’s cell phone rang back. He hit the speakerphone button and said, “McCallister.”
“Glickman,” said the clipped voice on the other end. “Am I on speaker?”
“Just with me and Bryn.”
“I’m still uncomfortable.”
“Deal with it. I guarantee you, it’s safe. I have a job for you—it’s an encrypted thumb drive and I need a jailbreak on the files. Can I courier it to the lab?”
“No,” Manny said. “Send it to this address—” Bryn grabbed a pen and paper and wrote it down. “That’s a mail drop. I’ll pick it up from there.”
“I need it soon, Manny.”
“I run a first-in, first-out system. You know that. And I have about half a dozen jobs ahead of you today.”
“Double pay.”
Manny was silent for a moment, and then there was a rustle as if someone else had picked up the phone. “Hey, Patrick. It’s Pansy. What did you say? Something about double pay?”
“Yes.”
“Congratulations, you just jumped the queue. No, Manny, don’t even start. If you want to keep the shelves stocked, sometimes we have to make adjustments. Bryn?”
“Right here.”
“Mark out that address. This is the direct one.” Pansy read it out, and Bryn blinked in surprise.
“You’re in San Diego now?”
“Been here for about a week,” Pansy said. “Come on over. We’ll do lunch and I’ll take a look at your encryption problem. Manny’s taught me a thing or two, and I wasn’t too shabby with that stuff to start.”
Bryn smiled as Manny started swearing in the background about compromised security, and Pansy sighed. “Come soon,” Pansy said. “Or I swear to God I’ll shoot him and hide the body.”
Patrick hung up and said, “Do you feel up to it?”
“Seeing Manny? I’ve had worse today.”
He handed her the thumb drive, but didn’t let go of it when she pulled. “You’re still in shock and full of adrenaline right now,” he said. “I know you probably don’t know it, or feel it, but what happened is inside you, and it’s going to come out. Get back here as soon as you can.”
She shook her head. “I’ll take this to them, and then I need to go in to work, Patrick. And I’m fine. Really.”
He said, “I know you think so. When you need me, I’m here.” He let go of the thumb drive, and she leaned over to kiss him, just a quick, soft brush of lips. For some reason, she didn’t want to go further with it, not now. She needed to move.
In fact, she practically jogged upstairs, taking the steps two at a time, and paused in the doorway of Annalie’s room to look inside. Liam was sitting in the armchair, reading a leather-bound book; his handgun was sitting on the table beside him, as was a glass of wine. He adjusted his reading glasses and looked at Bryn over the top of them.
“She’s still quiet,” he said. “She woke for a moment, but didn’t fight the restraints. I believe she’s improving. We’ll know better tomorrow when she finishes the treatment course.”
Bryn nodded. “I’m going out,” she said. “To Manny Glickman’s. I’ll be back after work.”
“You’re going to work?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“I should think the reasons would be obvious.”
And of course, he was right. Annie, the early-morning panic of Patrick’s injury, the events at Graydon. It had been a very full twenty-four hours already. Calling in sick would have been more than logical.
But it wasn’t only that. She sensed it in him, as she had in Patrick: concern. She supposed she ought to be pleased they were so worried, but they were assuming she had some residual trauma from the day, and she didn’t.
She felt great, actually. The nanites had done their work, flesh and bones were strong and knitted, and there was no trace at all of the damage she’d sustained.
Nothing to be traumatized about.
Bryn changed into a business suit and higher heels, fixed her hair and makeup, and was out the door in record time. She descended the stairs faster than usual and found that she’d left her sedan conveniently parked just around the curve.…She didn’t remember parking at all, somehow, or driving home. Opening the door of the sedan, she smelled smoke, and a faint, rusty tang of blood. Hers. There was an old sweatshirt discarded on the backseat, and she used it to wipe down the seat. It came away smeared and dirty, and for a second something in her wobbled unsteadily until she forced it to stand still.
Then she got in the car and drove away, windows open to clear out the smell.
Manny’s new laboratory was located across town; as usual, he’d chosen a warehouse, but this one looked new and very secure indeed. The chain link was ten feet high around the property, and there were dozens of security cameras; the whole area was posted against trespassing, a legal nicety that meant it’d be much easier to shoot intruders, or arrest them. She found the one entrance, pushed the red button, and stayed still for the security cameras until the gates rumbled open. A sign she passed said PLEASE TUNE RADIO TO AM CHANNEL 720. She pushed buttons until she got the frequency, and heard a cool, professional voice saying, “This property is strictly monitored for security purposes. Do not deviate from the approved route or police will be immediately notified. Have your identification ready to present at the next station. No weapons of any kind may be brought into the facility. Be prepared to undergo standard security sweeps of your person and any belongings you may bring with—”